London fashion week takes us all over the city, but never before to the Royal Academy’s life drawing studio, the oldest art school in the country, founded during the reign of King George III in 1769, and still in operation. But there it was that Steve O Smith gained the approval of the current students to present his first show—it was up to them to let him use their space—a unique accolade for a fashion designer whose work transfers every line and brushstroke of his drawings onto the shape of his clothes.
Standing behind a wooden desk, with 50 or so audience members seated in the tiny Georgian auditorium where the students take their lessons, Smith presented his work in the form of a lecture. “Rather than drawing the models, the models will be wearing drawings,” he began, before his models walked in one by one, standing as he described how each of their looks came to life. “All of my work starts on paper, which we then translate quite painstakingly through fabric appliqué, and increasingly embroidery and embellishment into living drawings,” he explained. “I think of each piece that I make as a drawing in its own right, and that’s reflected in the way that it exists in the world, which is made-to-order and one of a kind.”
The energy of Smith’s first collections came out of his black-and-white drawings, based on the work of the 1920s and ’30s Berlin artist George Grosz. Smith’s business caught fire in 2024 when Eddie Redmayne and his wife Hannah Bagshawe were seen on the steps of the Met wearing his romantic hand-made looks. This season—all summer, during the heatwaves that sometimes sent his studio to 100 degrees—he decided to shift into color, inspired by his study of André Derain, the Fauvist artist who worked alongside Matisse. “I used three inks: red, cobalt, and Prussian blue,” he said, “ And here’s my brush!”
The first of those dresses, in red, with layered-in washes of pink net appliqué, and a swoop of a beaded bow at the hip, was made for British Vogue’s Chioma Nnadi for last May’s Met Gala. And as always with Smith’s work, that bought more customers to his door. Word of mouth and look-books have so far brought him what he says is “a very, very good response” from people who are willing to pay for their pieces to be made, and fitted to them.
“We have a really specific way of doing things, and it’s not like how anyone else does stuff,” he’d explained in a preview in his studio. The originality and quality of his work won him last year’s Karl Lagerfeld award in the LVMH prize. He’s spent the money on hiring and training up his own couture team—an embroiderer graduate of the King’s Foundation and a couture seamstress joining his pattern-cutter who knows the way around creating ever-lighter corseting-free panniers and “gabled” skirt shapes.
The new collection, named Fever, was based around Derain’s drawings of bathers at the seaside. Smith described in minute detail how the effect of his inks drying too fast, cracking and throwing up sediment had inspired his inclusion of drips and clusters of caviar beading. Backed delicately onto transparent fabrics, the lines and the colors danced with the energy of the ink that had originally dashed off his brushes. “You’re seeing all of the ways that the water has gone together and how it’s dried in strange ways, and how we’ve painstakingly recreated it with these glass beads, showing the brush strokes,” said Smith.
There were only eight looks, but it was one of the most intensely transfixing experiences of fashion week—an illustration of the originality and resilience of the British art school tradition, loudly applauded from the drawing benches.
